1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to document processing, and to compact desktop document processors for capturing data and images from checks and other financial and payment-related documents. The invention further relates to document processors designed for processing documents at a teller window, and to document processors designed for processing documents at a back counter or a back office.
2. Background Art
Document processing machines function best when the documents are introduced into them in a consistent way. The leading edge and bottom edge of the documents are used to reference the location of items of interest on the documents. It is common industry practice to require the alignment of document leading and bottom edges before introducing them into the document processing machine. This process is known as jogging.
Various mechanical approaches have been used to obtain the jogging function, as will be familiar to those of ordinary skill in the art of document processing. These approaches have included electromagnetic actuators, motor-driven approaches using eccentric weights and/or linkages, and others. The working effect of all these approaches, however, has been very much the same—to temporarily separate a stack of documents from each other so that interdocument friction is reduced as far as possible, and then provide alignment surfaces that the documents can fall against under the influence of gravity. That is, these machines take a quantity of documents and repeatedly apply an accelerating impulse to the documents, having the effect of throwing them into the air just far enough that they will separate from each other, then allow them to fall on registration surfaces so as to align the desired edges of the documents. If the process is repeated often enough, all of the documents will eventually come to be aligned to the reference surfaces.
Historically, banks processed large volumes of paper checks in centralized locations, either a central bank or a clearing house. Document processing machines in such locations were large, processing up to 2000 documents per minute. These machines were supported by dedicated, trained operators. These machines were further supported by other machines known as document joggers. The document joggers vibrated stacks of documents into alignment before introduction into the document processing machines. Document joggers were typically relatively heavy, in order to provide sufficient reaction mass to vibrate the documents. As vibrating machines, document joggers were also objectionably loud.
The centralized processing of documents was beneficial to document processing machines, because of the dedicated operators and document joggers. However, centralized processing costs banks typically three days in clearing a document. The “Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act” or the “Check 21 Act” was enacted by Congress to facilitate check truncation by authorizing substitute checks, to foster innovation in the check collection system without mandating receipt of checks in electronic form, and to improve the overall efficiency of the Nation's payments system. The Check 21 legislation has driven the demand for decentralized check imagers and sorters in financial institutions. Check 21 gives equal legal validity to electronic data obtained from documents, and has made it possible for banks to distribute document processing to speed the clearing process.
Distributed processing poses problems for the document processing machines. The operators are no longer dedicated, but typically tellers with a number of other responsibilities, and less understanding of document preparation. The document processors are physically smaller, less expensive by orders of magnitude, and greater in number. Document joggers typically do not exist in the distributed environment, because of their size, noise, and cost.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for an improved document processor that is able to provide document preparation analogous to the jogging function at minimal cost, without operator intervention.